Coronavirus variant detected in Santa Cruz County

The County of Santa Cruz Health Services Agency announced Monday that the B.1.17 variant, more popularly called the “UK variant,” has made its way onto county soil.

The county is monitoring two confirmed reports, it said in a prepared statement late in the afternoon. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been monitoring multiple mutations of the coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2.

“Our case numbers look very good right now,” said Santa Cruz County Health Official Dr. Gail Newel in the statement. “However, we must not let down our guard and need to continue wearing masks and practicing social distancing while in public. A virus cannot mutate if it cannot rep

licate.”

These mutations do have the capacity to carry a heightened risk of infection and mortality; the risk is lessened, county officials said, due to the development of the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.

“Vaccines currently authorized for emergency use have been shown to maintain effectiveness against variants,” county health officials said in the statement.

Local and state laboratories have been conducting random testing of positive COVID-19 tests for evidence of variants. UC Santa Cruz has been helping the county with the effort in the last several weeks, Newel said in an interview with the Sentinel earlier this month.

The county included that the patients with detected variants tested positive on Jan. 28 and Feb. 28 respectively. Because of this, residents should assume that the “UK variant” is circulating communitywide.

Solid stats

Meanwhile, from Friday afternoon to Monday afternoon, less than 30 new coronavirus cases were reported in Santa Cruz County — echoing Newel’s comment on case numbers. No deaths were logged in the county’s COVID-19 data dashboard.

Since last Tuesday, the daily new case count has remained a single-digit figure. The county’s active known case count decreased over the weekend by approximately 20 cases and the recovered known case count increased by 49 cases.

In addition to the COVID-19 death toll remaining at 197, the total number of cases requiring hospitalization while ill since the pandemic began remained at 457. Additionally the number of COVID-19-positive patients in both the regular and ICU units improved. The county’s open ICU bed count reached a new height of 12 beds; this is the highest the figure has climbed since mid-October, state metric graphs show. Between Dominican and Watsonville Community Hospitals, the county’s ICU capacity is currently 54%.

An influx of approximately 700 new negative tests was recorded over the weekend, a recent high. The total number of test results flowing into the dashboard has ebbed and flowed, evidenced by weekends spanning over the last month when, on average, between 100 and 300 tests were processed in the lab and loaded into the dashboard over a weekend period.

For example, from Feb. 19 to Feb. 22, just 187 new negative tests were reported. Two weeks later, from Feb. 26 to March 1, 315 new negative tests appeared in the dashboard. In the next 14day period, from March 12 to March 15, the weekend count was back down to 230 new tests.

Since one month ago, the county’s case demographic portfolio has shifted. While the Latino population makes up 54.04% of the total cases rather than 54.66%, the white population has seen an increase from 18.35% to 18.89%. Still, the Latino community only makes up for 33.49% of the county’s population while the white community makes up over half, or 57.55% of the population. Other populations have only varied within 0.05% with the exception of the multiple races category, which increased from 1.60% of cases to 1.71% of cases.

The county has made an effort in equitably vaccinating residents, they have said during health leadership press conferences on Thursdays, especially those hardest hit by the health crisis. This is evident as more people are vaccinated, with percentages shifting away from when white people dominated the board — making up, just weeks ago, for 48% or more of those with at least one dose of vaccine in Santa Cruz County. As of Monday, white people made up 41.5% of those with at least one dose of vaccine, according to the California Department of Public Health.

Another change to the demographics page of the dashboard came with the breakdown of the 19 and under age group into those zero to nine years and 10 years to 19 years. Still, the younger generation makes up only 19% of cases while the 20 years to 29 years age group makes up for 20.5% of cases alone. Residents 60 and older make up for only 16% of the county’s total cases, they make up for 93% of all county COVIDrelated deaths. The CDPH says that of the 131,211 doses that have been administered to residents, 45.3% of those with at least one dose of the vaccine are 65 and older.

Because of the demographic categories such as “other” and “unknown” and how widely they span, County of Santa Cruz Health Services Agency Director Mimi Hall said last week that the CDPH vaccine dashboard is not the most reliable source. She did not give a replacement source for the media to reference, noting the lack of availability of data around the topic.